Red Room Where the Writers Are

There are no cracks or stains in the Dulux Colour Guide. The dogs never shed hair. The sofa cushions sit perfectly in line, the way they are supposed to and the flowers remain upright and timeless. There is no dust  and the floors are  free of scuff marks.The footwear of a family is placed in a neat and tidy fashion in the hallway underneath the umbrella stand with perfect umbrellas that never loose their shape and the tall beautiful fern grows abundant by the hour. Coat stands too, harbour little more than one or two casual expensive jackets and could never accommodate the teeming mass of  three hundred hoodies that accumulate in my porch.

I know all this because I spent alot of time today pondering over the colour schemes the Guide offered. O I could go on about the shades, the delightful Yellow Fizz, the seductive Film Noir guaranteed to create a Wow factor (not on your life!) and then there are shades of Gentle Bloom, Praline Delight, Cookie Dough. Sorry, Cookie Dough? Oh, yes, dear guest, I hear myself rehearse,  thank you for admiring the freshly painted hallway, yes, it happens to be Cookie Dough. Will and I have always loved it. It reminds us of, Paris? No, sorry, actually, Baskin Robbins, first date, although, as I recall,  he opted for Rocky Road.

I should go on. Opulence. Avant Garde. Vintage Brocade. Riviera. Raffia Cream. And to beat them all, Aegean Sea. There's one for the bathroom. Strip off. Glide into your dream. Aegean Sea will erase all of your problems. Imagine that.

But that's what happens when you decide to get your house painted. You can't stop. You tell yourself and the hubby that as soon as the outside is painted that ''that's it''.  Never again. But it doesn't work out that way. You find yourself dreaming. Oh to have the perfect house. The catalogue version. Dreams take over. Imagine Cookie Dough in the hallway and Avant Garde on the ceiling. A little Vintage Brocade in the loo. Life would never be the same.

I worked for a firm in Flagstaff eons ago. I guess, thinking back on it now, one of the associates had a little crush on me. At his leisure he would sit in a chair and stare at me for one intolerable hour and ask me if all women from Ireland looked like me. There's a name for that nowadays but back then, naive as I was, I think  I simply  blushed. Then one day he invited me to see his new home at lunch time. I accepted. I thought it rude otherwise, he was paying me a decent wage. He showed me around the picture perfect home. It was flawless. Everything was right, down to the mirrors in the bathroom ceiling. I said yes, its lovely and my god and aren't you lucky. But of course he wasn't was he?  All he had to show was a  lot of  flash plumbing fixtures  and grand designs and huge glass windows and mirrors and decks and top of the line kitchen accessories. And chairs that nobody ever sat on.  He was simply  a lonely well to do man with nothing to show but bricks and mortar.